How are YOU driving traffic to your community from outside of the community?

This is a question that many community managers ask me. And although there are hundreds of ways to do this, there are also many ways to get sucked into reoccurring payments for services that claim to do it for you. Today, I am going to tell you about a service which is free and if you are a student (with a student email), it will cost you only $5 per month to upgrade - if used the right way, it could be the best $5 you spend every month for your network. Enter elink.io.

Think of it like this. Your community (if it is carefully moderated and maintained) should have discussions and other content based around categories. Humans do not like to hunt hunt hunt for a topic and respond better to visual cues. Elink.io allows you to create a single link with an infinite number of related links inside. You create a new link> choose a template > add your relevant links, each having their own image which represents the topic. You can think of yourself as a curator of the best discussions added by your members.

In this "Collection of Collections" which i have embedded inside a page on my mobile 2.0 you'll see you can get a lot of traffic by simply making your link collections neat and by having attractive titles for your audience. If you have a dedicated Facebook page or group, Twitter account or similar, consider sharing the links there for followers, driving them back to your site regularly. elink.io gives you a dashboard for tracking the views.

A few tips and tricks:

Choose a template which has an (*) next to the name as these are both newsletter friendly and mobile friendly

Use it for leaderboards or hot topics and then simply copy the newsletter code for any of your links and embed it into mobile broadcast for simple digests.

Consider adding links such as those which are based on content which has been tagged for greater coverage of a topic...

Yes you can actually embed the elink inside pages of your mobile version in 2.0 as I have done here

So now I ask you: How are YOU driving traffic to your community from outside of the community? Feel free to ask me anything.

You need to be a member of Ning Creators Social Network to add comments!

Replies

Every Link collection that you create can then be rolled together into a collection of collections. That collection can then be embedded into your site sidebar with ease. All you have to do is change the width of the embed from '600' to '100%' and it will work on both 2.0 and 3.0 Ning networks.

6) Paste the code above into the HTML section and make the CSS and JS sections blank like so

By default it will show up as HTML5 tab in your page sidebar. Go to the page settings and click EDIT PAGE then look down at your list of tabs. Find the HTML5 tab and edit the settings to change the title accordingly..enjoy!